We have a new pet. It’s not a replacement pet, we’ve never had a pet before, unless you count the pet rocks when the children were little. It’s a totally new pet.

What, you might ask, are we doing with a pet after so many years where our pet hate was just that? Especially a pet that was quite expensive to buy. The answer lies in its characteristics. Its demands are minimal, though occasionally it asks to be picked up, and it feeds itself, in the right circumstances. It doesn’t shed hairs all over the place, quite the contrary, though it does require grooming every so often to remove tangles. It’s fearful of stairs, so you’ll never find it unexpectedly in the bedroom. It bimbles unpredictably around the room, sometimes bumping into things, but always very gently. It makes little burbles of delight when it achieves something. It’s downright entertaining to watch.

“What is it, then,” you might pose as a follow up question, “this paragon of pets? It doesn’t sound like any cat or dog I’ve ever heard of, nor tortoise or guinea pig, or fish.”

And you’d be right. It’s not like any of those things, seeing as how they are essentially organic. This is an inorganic pet – a robot. I’ll come clean, which is just what the pet is supposed to do. It’s an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.

When you set Roombie (as I imaginatively call it) going, it’s very hard to avoid the impression that it is alive as it wanders underneath the sideboard, bumps into the walls and trundles across the carpet. It finds its way into small spaces but then has to bump around until it finds its way out again, with all the strategic awareness of a bee battering against a window pane. The most efficient way to use it is to clear the floor of small things and leave only the sofas and armchairs and other large furniture. The most entertaining is to leave everything where it is, in fact to construct a sort of maze, and see how it gets on.

I expect the novelty will wear off, but even then we’ll have cleaner floors.